Bahrain protests to add to pressure on government

Non-OPEC Bahrain, which unlike its Gulf Arab peers has little spare cash to throw at social problems, said last week it would spend an extra $417 million on social items, including food subsidies — a reversal of attempts to prepare the public for cuts in subsidies.

Shadi Hamid, analyst at the Brookings Centre in Doha, said protests in Bahrain were unlikely to draw support from across sectarian lines, and this could limit the size of demonstrations in a country with just over half a million Bahrainis.

“Not everyone in Bahrain agrees that democracy is a good thing because that will put the Sunni minority’s power at risk,” he said.

The government launched a security crackdown last August against some Shi’ite groups to stop this, but it has loosened its grip since the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia.

The trial of 25 Shi’ite men arrested in the crackdown and charged with inciting violence to topple the government has remained the main bone of contention. The trial is stalled after a series of lawyers resigned, and observers are wondering whether the king might pardon some of the detainees. Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, is one of a string of Sunni-led U.S. allies in the region that Washington depends on to curtail the regional influence of Shi’ite Iran.

Top oil exporter Saudi Arabia, which has a sizeable Shi’ite population in its eastern provinces adjacent to Bahrain, is worried it might lose allies to counter Iran.

Bahrain’s main Shi’ite opposition group, Wefaq, will play a decisive role in Monday’s protests as it could quickly mobilise tens of thousands of supporters and send them into the streets.

But observers and analysts say Wefaq is a cautious group that will not join street protests on a large scale but will wait to see how many more concessions the government will make.

The group has taken part in parliamentary elections introduced as part of political reforms launched by the king in the early 2000s to draw Shi’ites into the political system and quell the large-scale street protests of the 1990s.

“Wefaq is fundamentally constrained by the position it put itself in, it’s decided to work within the system, it’s decided not to provoke the Sunni regime so they’re stuck in that paradigm right now,” Hamid said.